4,951 papers · page 77 of 248
Refactoring engines are standard tools in today's Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). They allow programmers to perform one refactoring at a time, but programmers need more. Most design patterns in the Gang-of-Four text can be written as a refactoring script -- a programm…
In a large, long-lived project, an effective code review process is key to ensuring the long-term quality of the code base. In this work, we study code review practices of a large, open source project, and we investigate how the developers themselves perceive code review quality.…
Energy is a critical resource for apps that run on mobile devices. Among all operations, making HTTP requests is one of the most energy consuming. Previous studies have shown that bundling smaller HTTP requests into a single larger HTTP request can be an effective way to improve …
Detecting bugs with code mining has proven to be an effective approach. However, the existing methods suffer from reporting serious false positives and false negatives. In this paper, we developed an approach called AntMiner to improve the precision of code mining by carefully pr…
One challenge for maintaining a large-scale software system, especially an online service system, is to quickly respond to customer issues. The issue reports typically have many categorical attributes that reflect the characteristics of the issues. For a commercial system, most o…
Programs written in unsafe languages like C and C++ often suffer from errors like buffer overflows, dangling pointers, and memory leaks. Dynamic analysis tools like Valgrind can detect these errors, but their overhead---primarily due to the cost of instrumenting every memory read…
Programmer-provided identifier names convey information about the semantics of a program. This information can complement traditional program analyses in various software engineering tasks, such as bug finding, code completion, and documentation. Even though identifier names appe…
We present the first systematic analysis of key characteristics of patch search spaces for automatic patch generation systems. We analyze sixteen different configurations of the patch search spaces of SPR and Prophet, two current state-of-the-art patch generation systems. The ana…
In recent years, researchers have intensively investigated various topics in test prioritization, which aims to re-order tests to increase the rate of fault detection during regression testing. While the main research focus in test prioritization is on proposing novel prioritizat…
Selecting and prioritizing major device models are critical for mobile app developers to select testbeds and optimize resources such as marketing and quality-assurance resources. The heavily fragmented distribution of Android devices makes it challenging to select a few major dev…
Many bugs in JavaScript applications manifest themselves as objects that have incorrect property values when a failure occurs. For this type of error, stack traces and log files are often insufficient for diagnosing problems. In such cases, it is helpful for developers to know th…
The energy consumption of software is an increasing concern as the use of mobile applications, embedded systems, and data center-based services expands. While research in green software engineering is correspondingly increasing, little is known about the current practices and per…
All engineering disciplines are founded and rely on models, although they may differ on purposes and usages of modeling. Interdisciplinary domains such as Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) seek approaches that incorporate different modeling needs and usages. Specifically, the Simulin…
Since debugging is a time-consuming activity, automated program repair tools such as GenProg have garnered interest. A recent study revealed that the majority of GenProg repairs avoid bugs simply by deleting functionality. We found that SPR, a state-of-the-art repair tool propose…
Almost every software system provides configuration options to tailor the system to the target platform and application scenario. Often, this configurability renders the analysis of every individual system configuration infeasible. To address this problem, researchers have propos…
Software projects embrace variability to increase adaptability and to lower cost; however, others blame variability for increasing complexity and making reasoning about programs more difficult. We carry out a controlled experiment to quantify the impact of variability on debuggin…
Mainstream compilers contain a large number of peephole optimizations, which perform algebraic simplification of the input program with local rewriting of the code. These optimizations are a persistent source of bugs. Our recent research on Alive, a domain-specific language for e…
The rising popularity of Android and the GUI-driven nature of its apps have motivated the need for applicable automated GUI testing techniques. Although exhaustive testing of all possible combinations is the ideal upper bound in combinatorial testing, it is often infeasible, due …
Despite decades of research on software metrics, we still cannot reliably measure if one design is more maintainable than another. Software managers and architects need to understand whether their software architecture is "good enough", whether it is decaying over time and, if so…
Finding and fixing code quality concerns, such as defects or poor understandability of code, decreases software development and evolution costs. A common industrial practice to identify code quality concerns early on are code reviews. While code reviews help to identify problems …